Pablo Was Right About Everything

Two years ago, language learning was in a scary state on YouTube and the internet at large. I remember when I first got into learning Spanish and I looked up how to learn Spanish, the top videos I would find were videos like "learn Spanish in your sleep" with an AI voiceover or just tons of non-native speakers giving grammar explanations. There didn't seem to be any one method that people were converging around in the mainstream, and that's what I look for when I pick up a new skill. I look for some theory or method that makes sense to me and is backed up by empirical data. And when I say empirical data, I don't mean scientific studies. I mean people. I mean tons and tons of stories from people, tons of testimonials that say, "I used this method and it worked for me." And that's what Dreaming Spanish was. It was a well-explained, try-it-and-see method with a gigantic cult following on Reddit, and it caught my attention. I joined the subreddit, I started tracking my hours, and now I sit before you today as one of the many living examples of people who have reached an impressive level of Spanish in an impressive amount of time because Pablo was right about everything.

What's going on, guys? My name's Nick, I'm the creator of LinguaLytics and a fluent speaker of the Spanish language. Nowadays, it feels like Dreaming Spanish is always under assault [music] because of Pablo's insistence that you shouldn't use direct translations, you shouldn't speak early, and you shouldn't learn any grammar. I've given my opinions about this in the past, but I want to make one thing clear. I don't think this is nearly as important as people make it out to be. I think the only reason there's so much debate about these things online is because of how popular Pablo is. So, when he firmly insists something, it just naturally sparks conversation.

Whenever I make a video and put Dreaming Spanish or Pablo somewhere in the title of the video, it always gets at least a thousand views, and that might not mean a lot for other YouTubers, but this is a small channel. So, what that signals to me is that Pablo's contribution to language learning was so compelling that he basically changed the entire landscape of the conversation on YouTube to focus in on his method. Not because he spent the most ad money, but because his method was so effective that he basically created an army of language learners hungry for input. And that created a cascading effect. It created this giant demand for comprehensible input on YouTube. Now, you rarely see those "learn Spanish in your sleep" videos. You see less and less of the grammar explanation videos. They're still popular in the mainstream, but it seems to me like they're dying out.

In one of my videos, I actually kind of roasted a traditional Spanish learning channel, and in that video, he used the word "comprehensible input." Back two years ago, nobody said the word "comprehensible input." The only person who said the word "comprehensible input" that you could find on YouTube was Pablo. And now, the traditional language learning channels, they're throwing it around because they see, they see the direction that YouTube is going. And further proof, I run the website LinguaLytics, as previously stated, and I see so many new comprehensible input creators popping up every day. Crazy amounts. Sometimes we forget the only reason we have input videos in Russian, German, French is because Pablo made comprehensible input much more mainstream. The sheer volume of comprehensible input content you can find on the internet today is a direct result of Pablo and the Dreaming Spanish method.

So, sometimes it pains me to squabble over things like how often should we translate, how much grammar should we learn, how early should we speak. I have opinions, and they're different from Pablo's, but I still feel like we agree on the fundamental idea behind language learning. The fundamental idea that really didn't exist in the mainstream when I started my language learning journey. And here's that fundamental: Your fluency in a language is essentially a function of the amount of hours you've spent consuming comprehensible input.

Knowing this completely changed my perception of how I was going to become fluent in Spanish. I wasn't going to become fluent by listening to a bunch of grammar explanations. I wasn't going to become fluent by doing a bunch of direct translation puzzles. I didn't need some kind of Spanish tutor to get me there. I was going to become fluent by taking in a massive amount of Spanish input at a level I understood. That was the key for me. It was the first method that made any sense to me when I got into language learning. It felt like it aligned perfectly with how I learned to do other things up to that point in my life. My life motto is to learn to do a thing, do the thing. To learn to understand a language, listen to the language. And comprehensible input, in its essence, is really just listening to a language at the most accessible level possible for you.

As someone who's lifted and gone to the gym since college, I found that the comprehensible input method had a lot of analogs with how we train when we're trying to build muscle. I've always thought of comprehensible input like time under tension in the gym. To grow a muscle, you just need to put it under a certain amount of stress for a long enough time. Over time, your muscles adapt, which allows you to lift heavier and heavier weights. I tend to think of comprehensible input as your brain being put under the tension of a foreign language, so it naturally adapts like a muscle. And it's also like progressive overload. When you first go to the gym, you don't start with the heaviest weights you can find. You start with what you can lift, and you slowly build up incrementally over time, lifting heavier and heavier weights. With language, that means listening to things that are always just a little bit above your level, 80% comprehension range. Over time, what felt difficult begins to feel more natural, and you start to be able to understand more and more without you even realizing it.

When I found Dreaming Spanish, I'd already tried and failed to learn Spanish, and I think that was what was so special about the Dreaming Spanish subreddit. I really got this feeling that everybody here is just like me. And when you would see progress posts, it felt so obtainable. You were like, "Yes, I can do that." And then when you put the time in yourself and you see yourself crossing those same thresholds, it just gives you so much confidence, and it feels so common sense. That's something that no other language learning community had. I feel like the majority of language learning communities I would go to, half of what you'd see is, "I don't know if this is working. This doesn't feel like it's working. When does this work?" Whereas in Dreaming Spanish, especially when it was small, when I was in the sub, small, relatively small, smaller than it is today, everybody seemed to be like, "Oh my god, this works." And it was a different feeling. It was a different vibe than any other language learning community I'd ever been in.

What Pablo actually did for language learning, I feel like it gets lost in debates. I want to spell it out here. The idea behind comprehensible input isn't new. That famous video that we've all seen of Stephen Krashen talking about comprehensible input, as you can see by the camera quality, it's from the '80s. It's old. The theory that we acquire languages through massive amounts of understandable input has been sitting in academic papers since my parents were in middle school. But nobody looking up "how do I learn Spanish" in 2023 was going to stumble across that Stephen Krashen video. And even if they did, they wouldn't have access to that high-quality, on-demand input that we're accustomed to in 2026. What Pablo actually did is he brought the comprehensible input idea to the mainstream. He brought it to the internet and he created a YouTube channel full of content that you could actually use, and later went on to inspire tons of other people to do the exact same thing.

Also, for decades, language learning was essentially held hostage by academia. The message was clear: You can't do this on your own. You need a lesson plan. You need a tutor. You need a classroom. You need a curriculum. You can't do this on your own. The entire system was built around the idea that language learning requires an institution. That without lesson plans and graded exams and someone with a degree standing at the front of a room, you simply can't learn. And guys, I hate that so much. I hate that very, very much. We walked away from language classes thinking we weren't cut out for it, when in reality, the methods we were using were never designed to make us fluent. They were designed to be teachable. They were designed to fit in lesson plans, to be gradable. There's a huge difference between a method that works and a method that fits inside a semester.

Pablo broke that. He said, "You don't need a teacher. You don't need a classroom. You just need a massive amount of compelling input in the language you're trying to learn, and your brain will fill in the rest like it did when you were a kid." So, in conclusion, Pablo was right about everything, or at least everything that I find important. Now, the purism debate is somewhere where I waver and I fence it. I haven't taken a very strong position. In my opinion, the amount you should study in a language is somewhere between 0 and 1%. So, to me, again, it doesn't seem that important. I dogmatically believe that the true measure of fluency is comprehensible input over time, and everything else is secondary. Now, if you're looking for a video where I do kind of get more into my thoughts on purism, I'm going to put that video right here, and uh, don't forget to give this video a like. I will see you on the next one.